The present invention relates generally to a digital data sheet application, and more particularly to conditional permission control in a digital data sheet based on a permission formula.
In a digital data sheet application, there is a common requirement to add permission control for setting data range or cells with different permission (such as read-only and editable) for different users. Therefore, some cells are read-only for some users while some are editable for some other users. Such requirement is especially strong in an online collaborative editing application or for the case in which people use a data sheet as a workflow tool.
Known solutions link information of users or roles to cells, to achieve the objective to grant with permissions. First, these solutions are very inefficient. If many cell ranges need to be assigned with permissions to different users, the workload will be huge. Second, the permissions are static. The permissions are not related to other conditional rules, such as data content, date/time, etc. Therefore, the permission control is not convenient and lack of flexibility.